


bruises on eyelids, bruises on throat

by paperclipsentimental



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Frank Castle character study, Hopeful Ending, Mentions of Suicide, Reflective Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 08:58:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16636877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipsentimental/pseuds/paperclipsentimental
Summary: Frank Castle is a man, no matter how many metaphors you want to attach to him. His black eye is still a bruise even if you call it a flower that blooms beneath the darkness of his eye. It’s still going to hurt him if you press it, even if he doesn’t move away from the pain. Even if he doesn’t know what it is to not feel hurt, a kicked dog kind of living.





	bruises on eyelids, bruises on throat

People say that Frank Castle is a war – a hurricane, devastation and death and a raw force of energy channelled down into one human body. That’s one way of putting it. Not entirely true, of course. First and foremost, Frank is a man, no matter how many metaphors you want to attach to him. His black eye is still a bruise even if you call it a flower that blooms beneath the darkness of his eye. It’s still going to hurt him if you press it, even if he doesn’t move away from the pain. Even if he doesn’t know what it is to not feel _hurt,_ a kicked dog kind of living.

He’s a man. But he’s lonely in the way that wild flowers feel lonely – it’s almost like he doesn’t know how to be anything else. Deep in the soul of him it burns, and he has no hands to hold, no daughter’s hair to braid. This is what _nothing_ feels like. What does it mean to be a person when you have lost _everything_ you have ever loved? Before Maria, before their kids, Frank had never loved anything in his life. He hasn’t loved anything since.

There’s something to be said about that – that kind of steady devotion, that kind of once in a lifetime love. Frank is sick of listening to songs about love – he’s turned the radio off in his truck because it makes him sick to hear these people go on about what they think is love. They don’t know anything, not really. How could you talk about love like a passing trend, like it isn’t the bullet that kills you. Maria didn’t make him happy. She put his world in colour.

Christ, he misses Maria. He misses her like a limb, like his heart got torn straight out of his chest, like nothing he knew was possible. He misses the way she used to touch him – hands through his hair and smiling against his mouth. He misses how it felt to have people be gentle with him.

It's been so long since the last time he had a hug that when Leo Lieberman latches on to him, shakes so hard he can feel her tremble all the way down to his core and presses her nose into his chest to feel him breath, he doesn’t know how to lift his hands up to hug her back. It’s been so long since these hands were used to for anything but anger and hurting people he’s almost forgotten what it feels like. Leo shivers and says _I thought you were dead,_ and he only just catches himself before he says back _me too, sweetheart._ Then he thinks, _oh._ And he hugs her back. Turns out it was like riding a bike – these things have a way of coming back to you. It is human to want to touch and be touched, or to feel intimate and to feel cared for.

His body remembers, even if his mind has forgotten anything but grief.

Frank Castle knows betrayal like the taste of fire on his tongue – he looks at a man who had his back, a man who held him steady when his bones were shaking apart from the stress, and he thinks _of course._ Thinks, somewhere in the back of his mind, _of course I had to lose this too._ His wounds are burning, he’s bleeding in a big way, but he’s never known how to quit, not once in his life.

Billy was beautiful in the way that twirling a baseball bat was beautiful – brutal and casually violent, graceful even as he started swinging. He wasn’t so beautiful by the time Frank was done with him, bleeding and crying out, wet gasps and ugly pain writ large across his face. _Good,_ thought Frank. _Good. I hope it hurts, asshole, because that was for my family._

He doesn’t kill him, but only because he want’s him to live in pain. There’s a special kind of ugliness in that – it takes a certain kind of person to bring someone to the edge of death and not take them over it because life is going to be more painful.

Frank wasn’t ever pretty, not even before he got his nose broken, or even when he was a teen, hands and ear too big, like a puppy still waiting to grow into its skin. Sometimes he still felt like that – like he was just waiting, awkward and lumbering and clumsy. Nobody ever looked at him and thought he was cute. Sure, there were the danger seekers who wanted to take him for a ride just to fell how dangerous he was, but nobody thought he knew how to be gentle. He was a clumsy kid – clumsy, and then deadly with no stopgap in between. Even now, he’d catch sight of a woman watching him in a reflection and be surprised, just for a minute, that she was looking at him.

People thought they could own him. But you can’t own a man with hurricanes in his heart and rain in his eyes, not even when all the fires he lights are to protect you.

A lot of people have thoughts about Frank – people think they own a part of him just because they played a part in his story. They think they get to play for keeps. Nobody understands that a person can never be _known_. Not a person like Frank Castle anyway.

People don’t get that – they can’t imagine a world in which you can see a man fall to the ground and fall apart and pull himself together and still know nothing about him. There is something personal about grief, personal enough that people think they understand a man just because they’ve seen it.

People think about him all the time; nobody thinks about how much it cost him to get to the way he is, not really.

They don’t understand, even when they try to.

Agent Madani thinks about him in the abstract way that a chess player thinks about the pieces still in play – aware of their potential use and with a goal in mind. Her focus was never about Frank, really. Not first and foremost. For Madani it was about revenge, maybe, or punishment for dirty crimes people have already forgotten, blown away in the sands of deserts nobody cares about.

Frank Castle was never a war to her, or a hurricane or death and energy – to her he was a means to an end. He was also a man who pulled her out of a burning car with bloody hands and he was a man who put his forehead to the barrel of her gun and said _you do what you gotta do,_ and he was a man who knew how it felt to die and live and die and live again.

She liked that about him – he was honest in his violence, unashamed of the power in his shoulders and the strength of his hands, because he knew what he was. Looking at him, she knows, somehow, that this is a man who thinks of himself as a weapon, and she feels her fingers twitch with the urge to see him go soft, slow and easy onto his knees. Not to control him, really.

She wants to see him go down, be easy and relaxed and steady, waiting for an order that wasn’t going to get him hurt.

So many people have hurt Frank, have given him orders that have gotten him hurt, have held his blood in their cupped palms and shrugged like they don’t understand what a gift it is. He’s so willing to cut himself open, to bleed and bleed and bleed for people, so _good,_ not in the way that fairy-tale princes are good but in the way that only men who have lost and lost and lost and still struggle onwards can be good.

In the end of things, fire still raging around them, she watches through half shut eyes, tired and bleeding but not ready to die, not yet, as Frank drags her out of the fire, calls an ambulance and sits down to wait, palm steady against her bleeding head.

Curtis is mostly just afraid for Frank – afraid one day he won’t come into therapy, that Curtis will call and call, track down where Frank was living and find a body waiting, not a person. Christ, it keeps him up at night. Frank, on his own, holding his grief like it wasn’t something that could be lightened by sharing. Like he wanted to hold it all, like it would be disloyal to let any of it go.

So Curtis worried, and he waited, didn’t try to force Frank, didn’t try to make him share anything he didn’t want to let go of. It felt like talking to a brick wall, only he knew that somewhere that wall was made of Styrofoam, and behind it was a tsunami of trauma, festering.

He thinks about opening that door and finding Frank on the ground. It’s not worth thinking about.

He liked to think he knew Frank pretty well – of course, Frank was a closed door, but Curtis had been through boot camp with him, had heard him sing and play guitar and get drunk by a camp fire, had seen him swing Maria into his arms and kiss her like she was the only thing worth living for. He had seen Frank relaxed and with his kids and in every kind of fight there was and under pressure and stressed and tense, trying to talk someone down.

Then Frank does go missing, and Curtis does call, doesn’t get an answer, finds Frank’s address and steels himself to walk inside. He’s ready for a body, for Frank to be sitting in the bathtub long dead. He’s ready for blood on the walls, or a hanging body.

There isn’t a body, but there is a tableau of grief, right there in every room, on the curtain and the blank, empty walls.

There was a bed, a sink, a toilet. There was nothing to indicate that a person had ever lived there.

People tend to say that Frank Castle is a war – a hurricane, devastation and death and a raw force of energy channelled down into one human body. Frank is a man. His black eye is still a bruise even if he doesn’t move away from the pain when you touch it. He still hurts. He’s still breathing, still kicking. He’s still somewhere, alive.

At least, that’s what people hope.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys!! So, this was me, avoiding actually studying I have to do for my upcoming exams. It's been kicking around in my laptop ever since I watched The Punisher on netflix, and i decided to polish it up and throw it out into the world. I hope you enjoy it :)  
> Title is from Crown of Honey Gold, by Equinox, it's on spotify, go give it a listen (it's kind of my Frank Castle anthem.)  
> 


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